Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/15

xii same special statements both of our questions and of our solutions, although by very different roads. Dr. Ward’s account, in his second volume, of the unity of the universal and the individual experience, his treatment of the dualism which has come to make the two seem divided, his consequent criticism of the mechanical conception of Nature, — all these are matters with which I find myself in close agreement. I shall be glad indeed if my own much more superficial discussion of this portion of my task can be of any service to the readers of his work.

From Nature these lectures pass to the Human Self. Characteristic of this part of the argument, and of previous statements of my own upon the same topic, are: my entire willingness to lay aside all assertion of the existence of a substantial Soul; my unreserved acceptance of the empirical evidence regarding the dependence of the Human Self, for its temporal origin, for its development, and for its preservation in its present form of life, upon physical and social conditions; and my insistence that various Selves can possess, in the whole or in a part of their lives, identically the same experiences, so that one Self can originate, or can develope within another Self, and so that the lives of various Selves can be interwoven in the most complex ways. The known empirical facts of “multiple personality” possess nothing surprising for such a doctrine. The individual Human Self appears, in my account, as a part of the Selfhood of the race. Social intercommunication amongst Selves is explained as a phenomenal indication that they share in a common larger Selfhood. The phenomenal dependence of Mind upon Matter is interpreted as another sort of evidence whereby